A half hour later Henry said, “Turn left at the stop sign. You’re in Salisbury. We’re only two miles away.”
Danny drove and admired the elm trees that lined the road. They got to the town of Lakeville and Henry guided him to the northern fork from the town center. “See that house up there?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanda Landowska lives there.”
“Who?”
“The harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska. She does all her recording there.”
“So? Where else would she record?”
“Danny. Most recordings are done in studios. S-t-u-d-i-o-s. It is very unusual to record professionally in a country house a hundred yards from a lake.”
“So what happened to Miss Landowska?”
“What happened is she made a great hit, recording the Well-Tempered Clavier for RCA Victor. The locals—that includes me and Caroline and Mother; Caroline is a great buddy of the great lady, ever since she was nine years old—got a kick out of it because—all this was written up in Time magazine—when she began to record suddenly she stopped. Said she could hear noise from cars driving down along this road. The audio people said there’s no noise, but she said she didn’t care what the audio people said, she herself was not deaf—Hi em noht defff!—unlike the audio people, and—she heard noise. So she went to the phone and called the state police.”
“Called the police?”
“I mean, called the state troopers in Canaan, said she was the greatest living artist, was recording, and would they please seal off the road—this road, the one we’re on—for a couple of hours. And they did!” Henry moved his hand up across the steering wheel. “—Yes, turn into the driveway right there.… Speaking of the police, I wonder what—”
The state trooper stationed by the driveway motioned to Danny not to turn in. Henry intervened.
“Tell him it’s my house. My mother’s house.”
The policeman bent down and looked at Henry, then back at Danny. “You’ll have to wait. Just a minute. There’s an ambulance there. It’ll be coming right up. Matter of a minute or two.”
Henry opened the car door and jumped out. “What’s happened?”
“You the lady’s son?”
“I am Henry Chafee. Mrs. Chafee is my mother.”
The state trooper, a man in his middle age wearing heavy dark glasses, paused. “Your mother has had a heart attack. She’s being taken to the hospital in Sharon. I suppose everything will be all right. But you have to wait—the ambulance,” he peered down the road, “they’re taking her into it now.” He motioned a clearance to the ambulance driver and a moment later it crested the height and turned right, toward Sharon.
They sat silent in the living room, and Danny focused his eyes on Caroline Chafee, struck by her peculiar beauty. She was as plain as a subject of Andrew Wyeth, dressed in the simplest cotton, her hair untended, a lustrous yellow-brown, her brown eyes demure yet searching, intensively engaged, her face oval, her fine nose and ears exquisitely framed, Danny noted, spotting the tension in her hands gripped on the ends of the armchair. Twenty minutes later the telephone rang. Mrs. Chafee was dead.
The telephone rang twice and Henry spoke with a hospital administrator, with a doctor, and then with the family lawyer. Danny took the earliest opportunity to motion Henry to one side. “Henry, at this point I don’t think I can be of any help. Would it make sense if I just took off, went back to New Haven, leave you and Caroline here without me to worry about?” Henry didn’t appear quite to understand him. But Caroline, grown in a few moments of tragedy into womanhood, Danny thought—this morning she must have been a beautiful girl, now she was a beautiful young woman—Caroline understood, and reacted decisively.
“Please stay, Danny.” Her voice was soft, yet oddly authoritative in tone. “It will help Henry.” Danny nodded. He would do as bidden.
Campbell Beckett, the family attorney, drove in. Caroline threw her arms around him and, in the arms of her godfather, let herself cry. The silver-haired lawyer stroked her hair and told her to try hard to compose herself, to accept the will of God. He went to the telephone in the little study. Henry was seated on a stiff upright chair, pale and silent. Danny, standing by the bookcase, could hear the lawyer talking to the doctor over the telephone. When he was through, Mr. Beckett addressed Henry.
“Dr. Coley is coming. He’ll be here in a few minutes.” He motioned to Henry to step outside with him.
“Did you know about your mother’s illness?”
Henry shook his head, no, he didn’t know about it.
“Dr. Coley will give you the details. I knew she was having trouble. After her physical in May she came to see me. She told me when she came in to make some changes in her will.”
“Was there any sign something was going to … happen?”
“No. She said the doctor had told her it could come any time, probably sooner rather than later. They could not bring her pulse rate down.”
Henry walked into the study and signaled to Danny to join him and Mr. Beckett. “Please tell him,” he asked the attorney, who filled Danny in. It didn’t completely surprise Henry when Danny then asked, “Are the kids, the, er, survivors, broke?”
Henry motioned to Mr. Beckett. “Please answer the question, Mr. Beckett.” He managed a half smile. “Don’t worry about breaking any confidences, Uncle Cam. Danny likes to be in on everything.”
The lawyer looked over at Henry. “Your mother has—had—some money. And,” he pointed down to the floor and then up at the ceiling, “the house here is unmortgaged.” He turned to Caroline. “Whatever you want to do, dear, the estate can pay the bills, if you are careful. You will have to give that some thought. You will talk it over with Henry, of course.”
“What has Caroline been doing?” Danny whispered his question to Henry when the lawyer and his goddaughter walked out of the room.
“Going to night school in Torrington, working during the day at the hospital.” They could hear the doorbell. “Here’s Dr. Coley.”
William Coley, all six feet four of him, maneuvered himself into the little study, was introduced to Danny, conferred with Cam Beckett, walked into the house and into the bedroom and closed the door. Fifteen minutes later he came out and sat down by Henry. He looked up at Danny, and pointed his finger suggestively at the door. A New England doctor of the old school was not prepared to discuss intimate matters in the company of an undergraduate from Yale who was not a member of the family.
Danny walked out of the room, onto the lawn. He gazed for the first time at the spring-fed mile-square lake Henry had several times made reference to. At the opposite end he could make out what he assumed must be the Hotchkiss School for Boys, which Henry had attended while Danny was at school in Millbrook, fifteen miles west. The site was quite beautiful, Danny thought, prettier than any of the lakes around New Haven. The afternoon had turned colder but the sky was cloudless, and the sun’s rays brightened the foliage, yellows and reds and golds. Danny thought to himself: What a hell of a place and time for this dumb—he couldn’t find the right word for it—thing to happen. This was his first death outside the battlefield, he reflected. How many more deaths would he come upon before—dying himself? He laughed inwardly. He had forgotten all about dying since the war ended. He doubted he would ever die, he teased himself. Dying was for people less … competent than he! Silly thought, sure; he’d die, as everyone would, one of these days. But for the next hundred years or so dying was for other people. Which reminded him—
What in the hell should he now do? After what Caroline said, he’d have to stick around. He couldn’t pretend he looked forward to sticking around, though Caroline was an entrancing girl. Woman. It would be good if he could think of something—anything—to do.
Henry came out on the lawn. His color had returned. He cleared his throat.
Danny raised his hand. “You don’t have to give me the details, Henry. Just tell me this, you want me here—you agree with Caroline?—or should
I go back to New Haven? I can find some way of getting back and leave you my car to use.”
“Thanks. Caroline has Mother’s car. I’d like you here, but only if you … if you don’t mind staying. Caroline’s better. The doc gave her some sort of something.” He smiled shyly. “I know something about shock.”
Danny’s instinct was to be direct. “Well now, Henry, I think I can remember that all right. How many days did you go without talking to anybody? Eh? But you know something, Henry, if somebody is so sick they can’t endure life, maybe it’s good it goes the other way? Maybe she was suffering a lot and you and Caroline didn’t know it. Did Dr. Coley tell you?”
Henry looked at Danny inquiringly, as if he had never quite thought about it that way. In fact he hadn’t. He didn’t really want to talk about it. “We should start thinking about having something to eat.”
Danny said he would go out and get some food and bring it in.
“You don’t know where to go.”
“I’ll figure it out. You stay with Caroline. Where’s a beer-can opener?”
Henry led him to the kitchen and opened a drawer. Danny took the opener and walked out to his car. He was about to press the starter button, but then stopped, took out a can of beer from the box in the backseat, opened it, perched it on the floor of the car and, descending from the car, reached again into the backseat. Under one arm he carried the carton from the liquor store, in his right index finger he dangled one of the gallon jugs of cider. He went back into the house and returned to the car with empty hands. The policeman was still at the driveway entrance. Danny asked him where to go to buy some food.
At ten that night, Caroline was asleep in her room. Danny got up from the chair in the living room and told Henry it would make sense to go for a swim, “especially since we’re both loaded.” Henry said the water would be pretty cold by now, but sure. He ducked into his bedroom and came back with two towels. He turned the lights in the house out, and passed through the door into the moonlight.
The two undergraduates, trim veterans of a bloody military campaign in Italy, walked the twenty steps to the lakefront, dropped their clothes, and plunged into the cold, pure water. Everything about this place is perfect, Danny thought, except that Mrs. Chafee—Prudence Chafee! What a name she was saddled with—got sick and popped off! Shit. Life is pretty sticky. Some people’s lives. His life was pretty good, thanks; no complaints. He swam on his back looking up at the sky. Then he bit his lip. Was all this booze-thought? Was he on a sentimental high? Four beers and a bottle of wine were threatening to make a philosopher out of him. Oh well, so why not? He smiled back at the moon.
But the water did feel fine, and he thought he caught a little regenerative smile on Henry’s face. Can’t hide from a full moon, no sir, shouldn’t even try.
Six
COMPLETING his junior year, Henry Chafee was busy. Like other students he was taking five courses, and like many of his classmates he was doing a divisional major—in his case, history, economics and political science. And then Henry was active in extracurricular activities. He spent one afternoon every week as duty editor at the Yale Daily News, where he was now a senior editor. Three afternoons every week in the spring he spent at the gymnasium, boxing. As when playing football or hockey, his fall and winter sports, Henry had a reputation among his teammates for exposing himself mercilessly to punishment. He would block and tackle with a zest almost singular, and on the ice was all but ferocious in going after the puck. When boxing, his aggressiveness was as marked as his defense was nonchalant. Earlier in the month he had been knocked out—“I’m not sure I was actually unconscious,” he said to the coach apologetically, lifting himself off the mat.
“You deserve to have been unconscious,” the coach snarled at him. “I don’t get it, your right glove was halfway down to your gut and—here, wipe the blood off your lip.”
At hockey he was skilled, in football he was fast but weighed only 155 pounds. As a boxer his progress was considerable, and late in junior year he qualified for the varsity team in the middleweight division. Early on a Saturday morning in mid-May he was on the old, rattly chartered bus, headed for the match at West Point. They were approaching Poughkeepsie when team captain Dizzy Koch, a formidable twenty-year-old 200-pounder from Minneapolis, asked the coach, Harry Gulph, if there was a magic way to get tickets for the Joe Louis fight at Madison Square Garden that night. The coach didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle but muttered, sure, all you had to do was pay thirty bucks to a scalper.
“If you want to call it ‘magic,’ ” the coach concluded, “say Hesto Presto when you hand over the money.”
Thirty dollars was a pretty magical sum of money, Captain Dizzy acknowledged; that would buy you three hundred hamburgers. And then, as if blinded by a revelation, he stood in the swaying bus, hanging on to the baggage rack, prepared to address the team.
Dizzy was an enthusiast, and now he blared out his suggestion, his scheme. Each team member would deposit three dollars into a pool, there would be a drawing. And? And the winner to take the boodle and attend the fight! There was general enthusiasm for the idea, except for Harry Albright, who said he didn’t have three dollars, and if he did, he wouldn’t risk it on so dumb a game. There were groans all around. The coach was caught up by the idea and confessed that he had twelve dollars left over from expense money, and that he would use that as “scholarship” contributions to the pool, available only for students on scholarship—“Raise your hands, everyone on scholarship.” Three, including Henry, raised their right hands. There was animated discussion on whether Harry Albright should be subsidized, it went to a vote of the whole team, and he won narrowly. Everyone was now a participant.
Harry Gulph collected the bills and the boxers wrote out their names on a pad passed around. Dizzy used the scissors on his Swiss Army knife, and the slips of paper were put into the coach’s fedora. Coach Harry was by now wholly caught up in the drama and with exaggerated gestures he first blinked his eyes, then raised his left hand to cover them, and then, absolutely to insure that he was not cheating, looked up at the roof of the bus while with his right hand he twiddled the slips of paper, finally drawing one out. Without looking at it, he ceremoniously handed it over to Dizzy.
“Here you are, Captain. You read out the winner’s name.”
Henry the Winner acknowledged first the congratulatory cheers, then the groans of frustrated disappointment; and later, just before noon, he knocked out his opponent, drawing cheers from ten travelers from New Haven and boos from several hundred cadets.
Henry found the experience exhilarating. At the post-tournament lunch he apologized to his victim, who remarked that he too had been surprised. “Damnedest thing, been boxing three years; never happened before.” He felt better when Henry said that he had himself been knocked out only a week or two earlier. The cadet seated on his right asked Henry if he had served in the Army before going to Yale, and Henry said yes, he had been in Italy. This was the formulation he used—he would not say, as most veterans did routinely, that he had “fought” in Italy.
With whom?
He identified the unit. Henry hoped the interrogation would end there, but it didn’t.
Had he been in action?
Yes, Henry said, and now he took over the helm, carefully navigating the course of the conversation. To have swerved over to an entirely different course would have struck his lunch mate as rude, or defensive; when intending to divert an inquiry into what kind of a life you had had in the military you don’t return suddenly to the subject of boxing. Something nearer at hand …
“My roommate was in the Navy in the Italian theater and was in on the landing at Nettuno. But it was successful, initially at any rate; surprise landing—you probably read about it. It was the Navy that delivered an Army corps in what was really total secrecy. It wasn’t the Navy’s fault that the ground commanders were too timid to exploit the opportunity before them. Kesselring had nothing in the area, largely due to
the fact that the Navy conducted a highly successful diversionary landing at Civitavecchia, sixty miles to the north. Here at West Point do you get any training in naval warfare, or does that come only after you get to be a colonel or something?”
The maneuver worked. It helped that the cadet, it transpired, was the son of a naval captain. For the rest of the lunch they fought happily the naval war, 1944–45, and Henry minded not at all when the action moved to the Pacific.
The Yale bus drove to the Greyhound station and when it stopped there to let Henry out, his teammates cheered him. He grinned broadly and, putting his gym kit down on the ground, gave his teammates the boxer’s triumphal hands-clenched-over-head salute, and went then to the ticket window to buy a ticket to New York.
The old gray bus was on time, and he worked his way to the rear. It was not crowded, but he did not want to risk sitting down within earshot of the gray-haired scrawny driver who listened to the baseball game on his portable radio as he punched the tickets. Henry was not in a mood for offhand conversation with the driver, or indeed with any one of the dozen riders sitting about the bus, men and women of all ages bound for New York for whatever reason. As the bus moved along on the western shore of the Hudson River, Henry observed offhandedly the light water traffic on the river. But there were a few sailboats, happily confirming the arrival of spring.
It was a good thing that he was unaccompanied, he reflected, since he had no intention of going to the prizefight. He was working in his own way, systematically, to overcome his fear of physical violence and he was making progress in his own deliberate, deliberated way. It is one thing, he told himself, to hit another student with a well-padded glove in a college gymnasium, something else to do the kind of thing that would be done at Madison Square Garden in pursuit of a half-million-dollar purse. He had seen enough newsreels of the great fights in which Joe Louis had been boxing’s king almost as long as Henry could remember. Louis was a good clean fighter and often he knocked out his opponent, but almost always there was blood and pain and flesh mutilation. When this happened on the screen Henry would close his eyes, and no one would notice. He would hardly go to see the real thing and run the risk of closing his eyes.
William F. Buckley Jr. Page 5